Zeus in Therapy by Prof. Douglass Stott Parker 8/16 - 8/25

Douglass Stott Parker, Sr.(May 27, 1927 – February 8, 2011) was a classicist, academic, educator, jazz musician, and renowned translator. Following his passing in 2011, the journal Didaskalia dedicated their new endeavors to "Douglass Parker, who embodied the interplay between scholarship and practice, between an acute understanding of the ancient world and a keen sense of modern audience."

Parker was Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin for forty years. Before that, he was an instructor at Yale University (1952-55) and a full professor at the University of California, Riverside (1955-68). He taught classes in Greek and Latin languages and literature and offered seminars on pastoralism, serendipity, improvisation, fragments, creativity, and the way the world ends. He was known at the University of Texas for his breadth of knowledge and teaching and won graduate and undergraduate teaching awards.

In 1979, he began writing Zeus in Therapy, a cycle of 52 poems which imagines Zeus on the therapist’s couch. Parker did not ‘finish’ it, though he stopped writing in about 1993, and left it unpublished during his lifetime. Parker’s poetry is whimsical and profound, cosmic and quotidian, thoughtful and irreverent, but always heartfelt and true. This translation of Zeus in Therapy into a theatrical experience will bring the power of his words to an even larger audience.